Controversy Over Voluntary Environmental Standards: A Socioeconomic Analysis of the Marine Stewardship Council

Abstract

Voluntary standards certifying environmental qualities of labeled products have proliferated across sectors and countries. Effectuating these standards requires the collaboration among and between creators (typically firms and nongovernmental organizations) and adopters (firms across a particular supply chain). However, the need to collaborate does not rule out the presence of controversy. Drawing on the case of the Marine Stewardship Council, a leading seafood standard to conserve the world's threatened marine fauna, we analyze how this controversy, from economic and sociologic vantage points, impacts a sustainability transition. In essence, interest divergence drives controversy over standard design, which spurs controversy over standard effectiveness and prompts the proliferation of competing standards. Controversy is magnified by the opacity or nontransparency of the fields which such standards seek to govern. We conclude that, while interest divergence and field opacity entail inherent controversy over voluntary environmental standards, the impact of this controversy on sustainability transitions is typically predominantly positive.

Alternative pathways to sustainable seafood

“…() describe the issue as a “devil's triangle” because it is seemingly impossible to simultaneously encourage new participants, while also ensuring existing participants continue to work towards higher levels of sustainability, all the while maintaining adequate credibility. Different certification programs have taken different approaches to negotiating this dilemma by weighing sustainability standards differently (Wijen & Chiroleu‐Assouline, ). This unevenness has created a need for greater surveillance of certifications and spurred the development of a global benchmark framework, called the Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative (GSSI : 4), which aims to address “confusion among producers, retailers and consumers over how to recognize a credible seafood certification scheme.” This is to say that GSSI has become a type of arbiter, essentially providing a mechanism for certifying the certifiers.…”

“…There is nothing inherently problematic with making deep investments in conservation tools. However, in the case of seafood certifications, these investments are being made despite legitimate concerns about their efficacy and execution (see Wijen & Chiroleu‐Assouline, for an overview). Furthermore, there is a general consensus that certifications do not work well in small‐scale fisheries or developing world contexts (see Gulbrandsen, for an overview).…”

Encouraging Investors to Enable Corporate Sustainability Transitions: The Case of Responsible Investment in France

“…However, the institutionalization of the SRI category and corresponding practices had a mixed impact in the studied case, reflecting prior insights into the effects related to the multiplication of ESG evaluation criteria (Delmas et al, 2013) and mirroring some of the findings of Wijen and Chiroleu (2018) in the controversy produced by the design and adoption of the Marine Stewardship Council certification standard. In our case, the abundant presence of data led to the multiplication of labels and calculative devices (e.g., scoring, ratings, and charts).…”

Governance of the circular economy: A comparative examination of the use of standards by China and the United Kingdom

“…The next stage in progressing a sustainability transition in resource use is to more consistently scale up and diffuse such activities. In doing so, a range of governance tools, like regulations, market-based incentives and standards, are being examined as ways to help steer change (Manning andReinecke, 2016, Wijen andChiroleu-Assouline, 2019). These tools are deployed in a variety of ways across time and space as governments and private sectors, and to a lesser extent citizens and Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs), interact to actively manage current politico-economic arrangements and shape future ones (Lieder and Rashid, 2016).…”